The present invention relates to the field of global wireless roaming, and more particularly to the application of prepaid services to global roaming.
Prepaid telephone services entitle the owner or representative of the prepaid services to make phone calls debited against a stored value account. Initially, such prepaid services were limited to land line phones, but more recently, prepaid services have been extended to wireless phones as well. Such prepaid wireless services have captured a significant portion of the wireless market, and the prepaid wireless services portion is capturing market share growth even more rapidly than the wireless communications field in general. The ability to use such wireless prepaid services in a global roaming environment would be extremely attractive, but such a realization is hampered by limitations associated with the existing infrastructure.
Specifically, although next generation mobile switching centers which monitor and report real-time call details currently do exist, implementation is not yet pervasive and certainly not universal. Therefore, the current prepaid infrastructure does not support global wireless roaming; that is, global roaming is available only on a post-paid basis. Prior art attempts at providing global wireless roaming all inherently include one or more of the following shortcomings: (i) available only on a post-paid basis, (ii) all traffic must be connected through the provider home country, and/or (iii) real-time account decrementing (for prepaid accounts) is only available on a flat rate basis.
These and other limitations associated with the prior art are overcome by utilizing a global prepaid roaming services method and apparatus in which a roaming phone located in a first region places an outgoing call to a destination party in a second region, and responsive to placing the call, a service processing node (SPN) establishes a first call connection between the roaming phone and the SPN, a second call connection between the SPN and the destination party is established, and the SPN bridges the first and second call connections to establish a call connection between the roaming phone and the destination party.
In second embodiment of the present invention, a call originating in a first region to a wireless phone roaming in a second region in a global prepaid roaming services scheme, is established by signaling from the first region to a home region associated with the wireless phone in order to determine that the wireless phone is roaming in the second region; signaling a cellular-switching center (CSC) in the second region, responsive to the determination that the wireless phone is roaming in the second region, to inform the CSC in the second region of a call connection request to the wireless phone; routing the call, responsive to the call connection request, from the CSC in the second region to a service processing node (SPN) in the second region and establishing a first call connection from the originating first region to the SPN in the second region; launching a message from the SPN in the second region to the wireless phone, the message instructing the wireless phone to establish a second call connection with the SPN in the second region; and bridging the first call connection with the second call connection, responsive to establishing the second call connection with the SPN.